Sunday, January 31, 2016

When I designed my new game engine, I used the old one as a base and tried to keep as many essentials in place while fixing any screwups and bolting new features onto the hub so it could serve as a drop in replacement scripting wise.

Or such was the idea.

In practice, the drop-in worked, but with horribly messed up game engine timing issues, and it hit me as to why:

RPG Maker's events are synced to any code designated to be active when first loaded, and since I changed up a lot of existing settings when the events expected different timings according to the scripts they used, this led to choppy framerates everywhere, so I'm gradually importing the new engine settings while fixing goofs as I go along.

I also have another issue: The new portraits in place of faces works fine, but results in some text misalignment in text boxes, currently looking into ways to compensate for this.

This has also forced me to disable any pixel movement in place of stock movement until the timing issues are fixed, as it plays merry hell with the framerate and screen refresh settings.

Progress is proceeding somewhat slowly due to these snags, but it is proceeding.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Before I decided to focus entirely on graphics, I ran my codebase through a final sweep for bugs, and sure enough, a few slipped past my earlier tests, forcing me to toss out some scripts and look for suitable replacements.

I also had to make some final changes to my new portraits. Sarah, Mara, and Lora are mostly the same as before, but since each covers a color (Mara - Red, Sarah - Blue, Lora - Yellow), I decided to alter Roto to have green armor and have some greenish hair, both to keep the color schema and to match his mother, who has green hair.

I'm still making some final adjustments to account for these last minute issues and changes, then I'll focus on doing more work on the actual game and importing some new graphics.

I'd also like to give Archeia my sincere gratitude for answering some last minute questions concerning permission to alter the work she allowed my limited re-edit permission for, and I'd also like to give her some free advertising to show my gratitude, as she's a talented and very valuable member of the RPG Maker community, and I highly cherish her friendship.

So, if you want to sample some of the highest quality resources one can ever hope to find for RPG Maker, give Archeia a visit here:

https://divisionheaven.wordpress.com/

And since her work is well worth every dime I've ever spent on it, please donate to her Patreon if you agree here:

Thursday, January 28, 2016

I've been testing out various functions in my game and have come to the conclusion that some scripts I was using need replaced due to incompatibility, being inefficient, or just a nightmare to configure and set up.

And that includes any fancy graphical effects, which I deliberately waited until I got everything else working to focus on.

Fortunately, this is not all bad. I have replacements lined up that should be much more efficient, and some have much simpler code as well, meaning it will run much faster even on toaster level PCs.

This does mean when I resume development I'm going to have to redo every fancy graphical effect event or scripted area from square one, which will be very, very tedious.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

I finally managed to make sure basically all of my scripting works save a few remaining scripts (these I need to stress test for certain edge case issues, don't expect any though), so now I'm lining up the graphic side of things, and it's grueling and tedious.

* Since I own RPG Maker MV, I planned on backporting some of it's graphics into Vx Ace (easy enough, just reduce the size of most of them by 25% and apply a little sharpening where needed to preserve graphical fidelity) since frankly, MV might be horribly unstable (so much so I have axed any attempt to port to it until they give the engine some stability overhauls), but it does have some pretty graphics. I also own (and thus have license to use the graphics of) RPG Maker XP, and I planned to port some XP style stuff into my game. The tedious part is getting all this crap organized (I literally have GIGABYTES of graphical crap to sort, and I only planned to use a small portion of it)

* I'm going to have to fire up GIMP and do some graphical modding to make some edited bust portraits. Archeia made some nice portraits that will look great with some color edits, and thankfully, I have a decent handle on this part.

* I have some event based graphical events I plan to replace with script based events. Reason is simple, script based events don't hog as many processing cycles and can run independent of the rest of the game code, meaning they won't slow things down on low end computers (even with a ton of performance tweaks, that is a possibility), so I'm going to have to test them to make sure the switchover is smooth.

In short, the scripting phase of my new engine is largely over, now to work on the graphics.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

I'm almost done overhauling my new game engine, and I have made a few more core changes.

* To eliminate some incompatibility issues with certain scripts and to make open sourcing easier, I have done away with using the Effectus performancr script and am instead using TheoAlien's Insane Anti-Lag.

* My SDK version will only release with scripts and all graphics required to run them so it can be picked up, forked, and modified by any interested party. My actual game version will remain encrypted to protect licensed art assets, though closed betas will remain available when appropriate and where possible I will release developer versions of my game, pursuant to the EULA for RM VX Ace.

* I will resume active development on my game once I confirm my new engine works well with my current game.

Monday, January 18, 2016

I've gotten quite a bit of my game engine implemented now, and while it's about 70% complete, I'm currently working on some other aspects my old one did not address in detail.

Movement.

The RPG Maker engine is a 2D affair in which movement is handled on an X/Y plane, and while diagonal movement is supported (using both stock game sprites and 8 directional sprites), the game renders this in an X/Y fashion, meaning it can present issues when working with events, as these ordinarily do not take anything other than the stock 4 cardinal directions (up, down, left, right) into account, and then only on a 32 x 32 pixel range on a X/Y grid.

This means I am currently attempting to make sure events work well when approached from all eight directions and that this results in no graphical weirdness with overlays and other effects.

Another thing I'm working on is attempting to make sure there is rudimentary mouse support. The engine comes with basic gamepad support, but mouse control is not ordinarily supported, and I have to make sure that it not only works, but that it also doesn't cause input issues with using the keyboard or gamepads.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

While there have been tons of questions about whether Brianna Wu has the skill to program and release a game, I'm going to be generous. The Unreal Engine does not require you have a college degree to try it out or develop on it. Nor does RPG Maker, my engine of choice.

However, Brianna Wu has claimed to go to college on more than one occasion and have graduated with degrees in more than one subject.

Recently, it has been discovered this is naught but a lie and that all of Wu's claims to this can be disproven by the colleges themselves.

However, let's back up for a second.

In my previous post, which I found out Wu was desperate to censor any mention of, I merely repeated information already in the public domain, which was enough to get Wu to want to censor it.

However, since evidence has recently come out based on college records based on the institutions Wu has claimed to have gone to (this information is free for the public to request access to and thus not illegal to obtain or discuss under American law), that evidence has revealed Wu has not only misrepresented themselves and their professional credentials, and has also confirmed the Breitbart article written here as factual:

A place called the Kiwi Farms has had two long threads on Brianna Wu, whom they deem a "lolcow", which, in their parlance, is someone who basically does hilarious and foolish things and gets all sorts of negative attention for it, and after submitting inquires into holes into Wu's background, they discovered the following:

I can only conclude based on all the above Wu has abused the public trust by not being forthright about their actual level of education, and has been engaged in attempting to remove all notice of these allegations to cover up the truth, which is why I have taken the liberty of archiving all of my recent work and intend to send copies to several journalists in the hopes.this quite apparent deception of the public will be addressed and rectified.

I further have every intention of challenging any attempted removal of any of my posts should Wu try to exert the influence they did on places like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and Reddit to remove similar posts by others, which, until it is proven libel, which I am confident it is not, is information the public deserves to know since they have been deceived and there is evidence to prove it.

I still hope Wu's game Revolution 60 can succeed, but I cannot stand for this deception of the public about their professional credentials, find the lack of ethics appalling, and will send this information to other journalists in the hopes they can do further fact checking to determine just how broad this deception really is.

In this article, Wu's past is revealed for what it really is, including the fact Wu was born John Walker Flynt.

Wu is now desperately trying to remove this information from the internet, apparently unaware of a little thing called the Streisand Effect, which means the more you try to censor, the more people will spread it.

You can see Wu's terror of this information getting out here:

https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/688139264907849730

https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/687845245481009152

Wu is trying to go to the top of places like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Youtube, and even here to silence this information, even though the only thing Wu really wants to censor is already public information.

I'm quite sure Wu is even going to go after me, even though I have documented evidence Wu libeled me on Twitter and I agreed to leave Wu alone and vice versa, as documented here:

If Wu does attempt to get this removed, I will be perfectly prepared to challenge any attempts to do so, as I have done nothing illegal under American law, the information in question was already published on a news site and I am merely repeating it on my own blog, and all I want to do is expose the truth about someone who has lied about their past for personal and professional gain, and given their level of celebrity, they are a public figure and thus open to public scrutiny.

I will not publish any information about Brianna Wu's current location, phone number, SSN/Credit Card Information, or any information that has not already been released into the public domain by news sites or can be legally acquired via Google search engines.

If Wu somehow succeeds in getting these posts removed, I have taken the liberty of archiving everything via archive.is, and I encourage the free, unlimited dissemination of my content to any other site (just cite where you got it is all I ask), as I will not stand for the censoring of truthful information about someone who has lied for personal and professional gain, and whose lies have been used to abuse and harass others like they claim the truth about them is harassment.

In the Progressive Era of the US, people who exposed corruption and lies were called "muckrakers", and I merely wish to do as they did and expose those who con and manipulate for their own gain in the hopes their lies will not be used to abuse the public trust any longer.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Brianna Wu or an agent of Wu took down the work of another transgender person who supported GamerGate to suppress information that was against Medium's rules.

Basically, proving John Flynt = Brianna Wu.

Since I've had it with Wu's lies and I won't stand for Wu silencing a trans person while claiming to be cisgender and riding that lie literally to the bank, below is a reproduced in full version of the original as my personal fuck you to Wu for trying to censor the truth:

I’m a Male-to-Female
transgender and like many others, I’m a GamerGate Supporter. I believe
that freedom of speech is paramount and I would trade my right to
transition and to legally change my gender in order to uphold this right
which every single person should be entitled to. I believe that people
should be allowed to insult me and that I should be allowed to insult
them without the fear of the involvement of authority, that
cyberbullying and cyberviolence cannot exist in the way that
anti-GamerGate describe it and I truly believe that the opinions should
never be policed, regardless of the medium, so long as it does not
incite phyisical harm to others.

I’ve
been involved with GamerGate for six-to-seven months now and I’ve made
some incredible friends from both the Anti-GamerGate and the
Pro-GamerGate sides and I wouldn’t change any of them. I’ve had strong
disagreements with both sides although I’ve always had a rapport with
most people. However, despite all of this, I’ve only received legitimite
negativity from one side of like-minded people.

Those
who have called me a transphobe despite being transgender myself, those
who have labelled me as “the one keeping trans people down” are those
who criticise dissent and free-speech. They are those who follow an
unquestionable doctrine of social justice and attack those with threats
of doxing and SWATing who dare to speak out. However, this group of
people usually holds a high respect for transpeople with two of their
most affluent members being transgender themselves, so long as they
follow the narrative…

When
the narrative is broken by transgender people who support GamerGate,
they will attack and this pedestalisation of transpeople is completely
lost. They will go at no lengths to degrade and ridicule us by
suspending our twitter accounts for not being a subservient tranny or
misgendering us for not using the “approved” list of pronouns. This
Animal Farm-esque lifestyle somehow lures transpeople under the guise of
feminism and equality when this is simply not the case as when a
transperson dissents even slightly, their war cry changes to “The only
good transgender is a dead transgender.”

The
negativity towards myself has been directed and my liberal usage of the
word tranny, which I used to describe myself frequently. I have always
referred to myself as a “tranny” in the same respect that lesbians may
refer to themselves as “dykes” and gays may refer to themselves as
“queer” which is completely jokingly and in a playful manner even though
the term itself has negative connotations and is seen by some as a
slur. I use the term tranny not because of some senseless notion of
reclaimation but because it makes me feel comfortable and allows others
to connect with me through humour. I believe words are entirely
dependent on the context of the sentence and on the speaker themselves
and those who believe words can be taken back are simply making the
claim that some cisgender, heterosexual, white devil controls their
lexicon which is just ludicrous.

Feministing.com
have published my tweets as evidence of transphobia in an article
responding to the ‘Samus Atrans’ controversy which was ignited by two
transgender women, Brianna Wu and Ellen McGrody, in an article on the
infamous TheMarySue.com website. The article referred to GamerGate
supporters as “white dudebros” and described my tweets with @remmarssa,
in which I enquired as to the lack of a christian transgender role
model, as “viciously transphobic.” I tweeted criticisms towards
feministing’s and the author’s twitter accounts and shortly afterwads,
the article was pulled. I contacted Jos Truitt, executive director, via
Twitter who informed me that the reason the article was pulled was due
to it outing a transperson, namely Brianna Wu. Brianna Wu has never
publicly acknowledged that she is a transgender woman.

Whilst
I am aware that Tanya Cohen is an alias of Joshua Goldberg, a troll who
was recently arrested, and thus the article is redundant, my issue is
that Feministing.com published the article believing it to be genuine
and thus have labelled me as transphobic. (Thanks, @NobleYad)

I
have also had Anti-GamerGate question my validity as a “real”
transperson in which I was misgendered and referred to as a “he she
whatever.” In response to this, I published copies of letters to my
twitter in which it details my status as a waiting list candidate to
receive hormone replacement therapy at an NHS gender clinic for April
2016. These letters were received in January 2015, two-to-three months
before I had ever interacted with GamerGate supporters or adversaries. I
want to make it very clear that I’ve never had my chosen gender or
pronouns disrespected by any GamerGate supporter in the six-to-seven
months of my inolvement.

I
hold the belief that the right to freedom of speech is paramount and my
own rights as a transgender person are secondary. I would gladly
sacrifice the right to transition, to legally change my name or gender
and to get married in order to protect the freedom of speech that every
single person has a right to no matter the medium. I accept that not
everyone will approve of my pronouns or the way I refer to myself, for
example, and those people have the right to that opinion just as I have
the right to disagree with that opinion without fear of persecution.

A
very popular hashtag in GamerGate’s infancy was #NotYourShield,
stemming from a discussion on 4Chan’s /v/ board, which was a response to
Anti-GamerGate claiming to be defending the rights of women and
minorities so long as they acted submissive to the narrative. I am
proposing that we show the world the ugly hatred that every GamerGate
supporter receives routinely from Anti-GamerGate who are not using
minorities as a shield to deflect our criticism, but are using
minorities as a weapon to attack our liberties. Sexuality, gender,
religion and skin color do not matter because we are #NotYourBullet,
Anti-GamerGate.

One of the things I really wanted to add to my game engine was lighting effects, but the old one forced me to toss this out when it slowed the framerate to a crawl, and now, I know why.

I was using a script that used looping events to make things like fireplaces and lamps glow, and it was really slow because events that are autorunning or parallel processes eat up a lot of processor power, since RPG Maker VX Ace ordinarily does not use the GPU at all and is almost entirely processor dependent by default.

The new script I'm using uses pure scripted events via a DirectX DLL hook, offloading the heavy lifting to the GPU, which means even low level PCs with integrated chipsets are unlikely to see any noticable slowdown since even though integrated graphics are much weaker than actual cards, they still can do most of the rendering without robbing too many processor cycles from the CPU. The script is also much lighter and efficient and avoids processor killing event conditions, so I expect to be able to prettify the crap out of this game now with nicer lights.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

For those not aware, Dragon Quest Heroes is what happens when Dragon Quest and Dynasty Warriors have a baby, and while it's a hack and slash/action RPG hybrid, I was inspired by it's ability to upgrade skills and have been working on implementing a "Job Point" like system into the game, so early game skills can still be made more useful in mid to late game.

However, I ran into hassles with this. First, while Yanfly's JP Manager provided a nice framework and KreadEx provided a nice system for this to work, the problem was putting a JP counter out for the player to refer to to see how points they accumulated. Dragon Quest VI and VII had a similar system but had no counter, and since that always annoyed me, I decided to add one for the sake of making the player's life easier.

The issue is that even though I found a script to make it show up in the player menu, it wasn't visible.

Items in menus are assigned their locations on an X/Y (horizontal/vertical) axis, and unfortunately, given I had to use several other scripts that add features that take up sizable chinks of the available X/Y plane, I had to make sure the JP counter would show up without bleeding into other text or player menu graphics, not be invisible due to being buried under an overlapping element, nor have hard to read text.

I finally got it working, though it required moving a few scripts around and fiddling with the x/y values quite a bit, but I finally got it implemented.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Another update on my game engine: adding a lot of sanity checks so certain effects I had to toss in earlier builds will work right, like fog effects (you have to use tags prevent them from showing up on maps they shouldn't and I'm making sure they don't conflict other scripts that add overlay effects).

However, I'm having a bit of an issue with implementing overlays.

Overlays refer to textures placed (or superimposed) over other textures, and since RPG Maker VX Ace lacks this feature like RPG Maker XP, I having to make do with Tsukihime's overlay scripting to use a sub map with the overlays be superimposed over the primary map to achieve the same effect.

Example: A bridge suspended over a ravine you can both walk over and under, which you cannot do normally in VX Ace without implementing an overlay as described above.

Unfortunately, the transitions are very jerky and the graphics do not update in a timely manner, so they work but it looks quite ugly, and I want it to be seamless as possible, though I probably need to do some script optimization to make it run smoother or use some more performance enhancing scripts, not sure which.

Still tinkering with this, hope to have some more progress done soon, as overlays make for much nicer maps, and I do want to revamp a few of the more boring ones.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'M JUST PISSED THAT I LOST MY TV TROPES ACCOUNT
BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING NAZI WIKIPEDIA ADMINS WHO TOOK
OVER THE SITE AFTER I JOINED AND THEY DON'T GIVE A
FUCK ABOUT NEGATIVITY AND ONLY CARE ABOUT NOTABILITY
AND THE FUCKING NAMESPACE SPAM PLAGUE THEY'VE BEEN
CRAMMING THE SITE WITH BECAUSE THEY THINK IT MAKES THEM MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THEY'RE NOTHING BUT FUCKING GREEDY CORRUPT BASTARDS WHO DON'T GIVE A
SHIT ABOUT FANS AND
MEDIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE REASON I JOINED TV TROPES IN THE FIRST
PLACE IS BECAUSE I WAS LET DOWN BY THE
ANTI-STUDIO COMMENTS ON MOVIE AND COMIC BOOK NEWS SITES LIKE AIN'T
IT COOL NEWS AND JOBLO, THERE'S NOTHING MUCH TO DO,
MY OLD YOUTUBE ACCOUNT WAS HACKED AND STOLEN BY A
NERD, AND I WAS SICK OF GETTING MORE COMMENTS AND
VIEWS ON MY YOUTUBE UPLOADS OF TV SHOW EPISODES THAN MY OWN
VIDEOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'M TRYING TO SUPPORT MY OWN
ARTWORK, VIDEOS, COMICS, AND ANIMATIONS ON DEVIANTART, YOUTUBE AND
OTHER SITES WITH A FUCKING EDITING ACCOUNT ON TV
TROPES, BY EXPANDING THE FRIGGIN' WIKI WITH MORE
AND MORE EXAMPLES, TROPES AND WORKS THAT NOBODY
FRIGGIN' TALKED ABOUT
THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BUT NO, NOW I CAN'T PERMANENTLY SIGN
UP AND EDIT ON TV TROPES ANYMORE BECAUSE IT'S YOUR OWN
FAULT THAT YOU FRIGGIN' REPORTED MY NEWER ACCOUNTS TO
THE GODDAMN FUCKING ADMINS, AND THE REGISTRATION SYSTEM
ITSELF IS BROKEN DOWN BECAUSE THEY'VE PUT A FRIGGIN'
SPAM FILTER ON ALL EMAIL
DOMAINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I HOPE YOU GET SLAUGHTERED AND DIE IN A PIT SOON, YOU
MOTHERFUCKING PRICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
D:<

------

Nate, few things in rebuttal:

* So I read ED and find it funny, so what? They've called me a moralfaggot, you don't see me crying like a little girl over it, get over yourself. Shit, get a hobby, get laid, go jump off a cliff, just grow the hell up and get a life already.

* So you don't like what Wikipedia and TV Tropes have done and want to change it? THEN FORK THEM YOU FANATICAL FUCK! Hell, I will happily point you in the direction of how to obtain dumps of their content so you can set up your own hugbox, just quit weeping because Wikipedia and TV Tropes aren't how you like them.

* Dude, fuck off with your drama, I don't give a shit about your sad little life.

* Yes, I reported your ass. You ban evaded, you deserved it. There are things called rules, Nate, and while I don't like a lot of what TV Tropes does, it's their site, their rules, and I made my own clubhouse where I can do my own thing, do likewise (legally, mind you) and get the fuck over yourself. And good, I'm glad they found a way to keep you from shitting up their site with your faggotry, you're a goddamned loon with an entitlement complex who can't take no for an answer unless you're forced to.

* Finally, how many times have you wished death on me at this point and I'm not dead yet? Give up, Nate, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have websites to run, some tedious database stuff to work on, and a game engine I'm trying to develop, so to paraphrase George Carlin, I hope someone puts a dick in your mouth, cause that's clearly what you want.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

One of the things I tried to add awhile back and gave up on was Enemy HP Bars as visual aids in battle scenes, but due to various weirdness like the MP bar disappearing in the player menu, bleeding display bars, and other bizarre graphical artifacts, I gave up.

I'm using Ventwig's HP bar script, Neo Gauge Ultimate Ace by Pacman, and the script that hates them both, the Ace Core Engine by Yanfly.

Given my usual practice of putting core scripts towards the top of my list of scripts, I couldn't figure out what the issue was until I examined the code, and the problem was that Neo Gauge and the HP Bar script depend on bitmap drawing defaults that the core script by Yanfly invalidates with it own, and since I need the Core script intact for some of its functions, commenting out or removing code was not an option, since Yanfly's other scripts rely on it's calls for their specific functions.

Then it hit me: Why not put the Core script below Ventwig and Pacman's scripts?

It goes against a lot of common sense (and I guess I have a pretty OCD issue with trying to keep the script I use organized by creator), but it fixed the issues, and unless I get any other problems from doing this later on, I've made notations of this in the developer notes I plan to include with the SDK version of my game so anyone who wants to use my work can avoid the hours of bashing my head against a technical wall I went through.